Subject: Re: advice requested : techno trends? Thu Sep 10 11:23:06 1998 > - What top 3 trends do you think would have the most impact on this > group (1-3 years out)? 1 - there's a lot of kicking and fighting among online providers to get real-estate products working right now.. within three years, i expect the majority of the dust to have settled, and some level of general solution dominating the market. the two major contenders in the arena are local providers who are strongly tied to whatever MLS system dominates the area, and large, nonlocal service bureaus who can offer a much wider range of services. from the small business point of view, that means having to deal with the local newspaper versus having to deal with a Microsoft 800-line, or its equivalent. 2 - basic data connectivity is becoming as much a requirement as electricity and water. there are a whole lot of properties out there with lousy wiring and inadequate power, and those factors will start to become an issue, both in closing a deal and in general maintenance. connectivity will be an especially strong issue among younger, technically savvy people, which is a market segment getting wealthier all the time. they won't put up with a property that can't connect to the net easily. also, while i see this as being more than 3 years out, the growing push for data appliances will also carry a demand for better in-home wiring. the person who's just bought a VCR that can be programmed through their PC won't be happy about having to string a cat-5 jumper from the entertainment center to the office. this is even more true for commercial properties.. no tech in their right mind would take offices in a location that didn't have network jacks in every room, and plenty of them. probably the best basic investment a property owner can make today will be hiring a competent electrician to run good-quality data points to every room. for commercial properties and apartment buildings, there will also be major issues involved with getting enough incoming lines run the the demarc point outside the building. both will take non-trivial investments of time and money. still, they'll be better off if they start planning now, rather than waiting for the rush. for the ones who really want to think ahead, there's the option of wiring a dedicated connection into an office building or apartment complex, then wiring all the units to that. much more work, and much more costly, but imagine how good a selling point established connectivity could be. 3 - it's my personal opinion that the net will quite literally change the shape of society. properties along the edges of urban areas, and in surrounding small towns, will become significantly more valuable investments. the shape of the cities we currently inhabit was determined by combining two technologies: the telephone and the automobile. 150-story office buildings allow similar businesses to concentrate, but they're worthless if the phones go out. they're also rotten living spaces, so people commute from the 'burbs into and out of the office zone every day. thus we have the shape of the conventional, late-20th-century city: || || || ........................++++++++||++++++++........................ a core of high-density office space, surrounded by a band of residential space, then a much larger band of suburbs which extends to the limits of driving range. toss in some support services and industries, vary the scale a bit, and overlap a few dozen, offset versions of the same pattern, and you have any major urban center. the net breaks down the most important reasons for concentrating businesses into a central core: bandwidth. a voice conversation on a POTS line is great for checking small facts, but lousy for carrying the large volumes of information most businesses need to operate. before the net, that all still had to be carried on paper. a large office building is the most efficient shape for getting a large number of people into the same general area as a large amount of paper, so that's how businesses organized themselves. the net breaks that model down, because it has a tremendously higher bandwidth. the mechanical effort of generating and transporting a paper document is now significantly less efficient than putting the same information into a computer file and sending it electronically. the determining factor in business communications is no longer physical proximity, but connection speed. sitting on a T1, here in Iowa, i can get information electronically from Australia faster (and more reliably) than i can get a printout from an office upstairs. over the long term, businesses will reshape themselves to match their new environment, which will result in greater dispersion: ..............:::::::::+++::::::::::::::::::+++:::::::::.............. | | -- data beltway -- high-bandwidth WANs are easiest to set up and maintain if you build a large loop of fiber (FDDI, SONET, whatever), then connect people to that. a small number of businesses which need extremely high bandwidth will place themselves close to the cable itself, but everyone else will just stay within the range where the price/bandwidth ratio is reasonable. around that will be a residential band from which people can connect with standard dialup accounts, or drive into the office if they need higher bandwidth. from the small property manager's point of view, the rent dollars that currently go to large skyscrapers will be moving out into their territory. knowing how to spot the trends will give them a better idea of where to buy, and where to develop. > - What one thing do they need to know about technology? not to take it so damned seriously. a lot of people are writing themselves off as technological have-nots, because they're intmidated by the amount of stuff that has to be absorbed. they're not really beyond hope, they're just just approaching the problem from the wrong direction. they constipate themselves with the attempt to jam 2-3 years' worth of experience into a 2-day manual binge, "because it's important". that's a major losing strategy, but people still seem to cling to it. what they *need* to do is learn how to enjoy tinkering with technology.. whatever kind it may happen to be. instead of putting their necks on the block to "motivate" themselves, they should try opening a little scrap file whenever they want to find out what a given command does. the latter route is a lot slower, but it's also a lot more effective. if the members of your audience spend 2-3 years just playing with computers and the net, they'll still have a heck of a lot better background than they would doing it 'seriously'.